So Much Work, So Little Time for Engineers

Given all the new tools and technology that promise to significantly boost productivity, why do so many engineers consistently rank "not enough time and resources" as one of their top challenges?

None of us, or course, is going to admit to watching cat videos or playing Tetris at work. But are engineers really as crazy-busy as they claim to be? And if they are, what's going on?

Those are questions that three engineering managers explored during a session at the Test Leadership Forum at NI Week 2014, organized by Bill Driver, a marketing manager at National Instruments. We also spoke with a few non-manager engineers to get their take on the issue.

Source: UBM Tech "Mind of the Engineer" Study, 2013

"Are engineers more productive today? I would have to say that they are, but at the same time we keep giving them more to do," said Ken Shephard. He's director of test engineering at Northrup Grumman, where he oversees a department of 160 engineers. "I think more is asked of engineers today vs. 25 years ago, but I don't think it's unique to engineers. Americans work more hours than anyone else on the planet."

That sentiment was echoed by Dale Foster, an engineering services manager at Boston Scientific, who oversees the electrical, mechanical, and software labs that support all design and testing of medical devices. "The claim is real -- engineers are busier than ever, but it's management's job to set the priorities and fight for more resources," Foster stressed.

"There's no doubt that engineers are much more productive these days. If you were to measure it by 'transistor count' or in the case of a software engineer 'lines of code,' a task that took six engineers 20 years ago to do can easily be done by one engineer today," said Edison Fong. He's an analog engineer who spent most of his career in big corporations and now does consulting. It was a career change brought about, not by choice, but rather by declining demand for the kind of analog design work he does.

Given the corporate trend toward "right-sizing" and the increasing focus on profitability, it's tempting to conclude that there are simply not enough engineers to do the work. And while engineering departments are decidedly leaner than in the past, the story is more complicated than that.

Thanks to the Internet, an engineer's job is now 24/7. "In the old days, we had more idle time," said Fong told us. "Not anymore. With Asia and Europe online, teams are working around the clock. I passed by Apple Headquarters in Cupertino the other evening. It was 9:30 p.m., and the parking lot was over 50% full. This would have never happened pre-Internet."

For David Ashton, a telecom specialist in charge of keeping a large communications network going, time always seems to be in short supply. In particular, he said, there is ever less of it for the kind of housekeeping tasks that, while not directly productive work, do impact productivity.

He believes a key issue is that managers are much more involved today -- and not in a good way. "In the past my team had almost total autonomy to design and implement our communications network as we saw fit. We had the expertise and also a good understanding of what the customer (in this case the rest of the organization) needed," recalled Ashton. "But these days more and more of the design decisions, actually any decisions, tend to be taken further up the chain by managers who don't have the expertise to get the best real-world solutions."

Illustrating why Scott Adams will never run out of ideas for the Dilbert cartoon, Ashton cited example after example of situations in which actions by management resulted in more work, more cost, and more time pressures for the engineering team.

"This is kind of a silly example, but awhile ago managers decided our storage area needed 'cleaning up.' They came and, without even checking with us, chucked out a lot of current spare equipment along with some old, redundant stuff. Against orders, I retrieved most of the current stuff, which saved us a huge amount of work later when we needed the spares."

I don't know if it's the same with hardware, but my experience with software development has been that a great deal of time is wasted and delay caused by incorrect division of work.

Any time responsibility is split between people or groups in a way that causes one group to wait on another's output, or separates decisions about interacting parts, it has two effects. Projects take longer than they should, because what one group finishes languishes in a queue until the next group can pick it up, (e.g. prototype production to testing). Meetings held in an attempt to communicate what is needed, tie up people who could actually be doing work, if they knew what had to be done. Everybody spends a lot of time not achieving anything, rushing to overcome delays, reworking what was done badly because it was rushed, or just not what was really needed.

Some of this is what "Agile" methods attempt to address. Small groups, properly balanced teams, and short feedback cycles help. Reporting methods that don't create more work than they measure are important. too. (The Duke of Wellington made a relevant remark on the topic: see http://kevinstilley.com/bureaucracy-select-quotes/ )

I once worked for such a "marketing" company doing tech support and then management wanted to devlop its own products. We hired several engineering consultants and I was the project manager/test engineer. As we kept adding more projects, allof them fell behind and we switched gears whenever a customer screamed "where's my product?" Marketing then accused engineering (me) of deliberately delaying the projects in an effort to keep my job. That's the last thing I wanted to do, for I knew that completing a successful project was a better way to keep my job.

Management also didn't understand the need for things like test equipment and bought on price alone.

And of course, I still had to do the tech support for the other product line, products where were imported and sold under the company name.

I've worked in many environments during my career, roughly two-thirds of which were with companies that understood engineering and were willing to allow the engineers to make decisions.

It is the employers that describe themselves as "marketing companies" that seem, in my opinion, to have the most difficult time with engineers. The marketing companies that I have worked for have been very unbending regarding requirements, decisions, and schedules. The engineers were treated like robots that were expected to produce error-free results according to the schedule created by management. While at one of these marketing companies, when a product didn't meet sales expectations the engineering team was informed that we "had failed" and were expected to make it right so that sales would increase. The product met every requirement, including the ones that engineering had argued against or in need of improvement.

1) it repeats the mistakes of the past. For a ling time at large Japanese corporations there was an expectation that workers would not work 9 to 5, or even take their annual leave. This reached ridiculous levels where on top of a multi-hour commute workers were not meant to leave their desks, and when the bell rang at 5 pm no one moved, waiting until the 7pm "doors being locked" bell before stopping. This bred a culture of stretching the day's work to fit the hours ie not more productovoty but just longer hours.

2) how many really tough problems do you solve when you are not staring at them but instead you are doing something completely separate, like walking, reading a book, even sleeping? By working long hours you don't necessarily get to the solution any quicker and you do weaken yourself physically and mentally, and damage home life (which is after all what the work is meant to be paying for, isn't it?)